Holistic Privacy and Usability of a Cryptocurrency Wallet
This addresses usability and privacy problems for cryptocurrency end-users, but it is incremental as it focuses on evaluating existing software rather than proposing new solutions.
The study tackled usability issues in cryptocurrency wallets, particularly ZCash, by introducing the concept of holistic privacy and conducting a 60-person evaluation, finding that only 25% of users could complete a real-world purchase due to difficulties integrating the wallet with network-level protections like VPNs or Tor.
In this study, we overview the problems associated with the usability of cryptocurrency wallets, such as those used by ZCash, for end-users. The concept of "holistic privacy," where information leaks in one part of a system can violate the privacy expectations of different parts of the system, is introduced as a requirement. To test this requirement with real-world software, we did a 60 person task-based evaluation of the usability of a ZCash cryptocurrency wallet by having users install and try to both send and receive anonymized ZCash transactions, as well as install a VPN and Tor. While the initial wallet installation was difficult, we found even a larger amount of difficulty integrating the ZCash wallet into network-level protection like VPNs or Tor, so only a quarter of users could complete a real-world purchase using the wallet.